The Lifted Veil recap

Latimer, a sensitive and unhappy younger son, develops the power to foresee fragments of the future and hear other people's thoughts. Instead of bringing intimacy, the gift exposes vanity, boredom, and concealed hostility everywhere. He becomes obsessed with Bertha Grant, his brother Alfred's fiancée, because her mind alone remains closed to him. After Alfred dies, Latimer marries her, only to find the marriage cold and increasingly hateful. Years later his physician friend Charles Meunier briefly revives Bertha's dying maid, Mrs. Archer, by experimental transfusion. The maid uses her momentary return to reveal that Bertha asked her to poison Latimer. Bertha departs after the exposure, while Latimer remains alone, writing his history as the date of his foreseen death approaches.

Latimer writes in anticipation of a death he believes will occur within weeks, then looks back on the origin of his misery. A frail, imaginative younger son, he grows up feeling inferior to his vigorous brother Alfred and misunderstood by their practical father. During an illness away from home, Latimer experiences a vivid scene of a city he has never visited; when he later sees the place, he realizes that the experience was a vision of the future. He also begins hearing the thoughts of people around him. Their hidden pettiness and self-interest overwhelm him and deepen his isolation. Bertha Grant, Alfred's beautiful fiancée, is the sole exception: Latimer cannot enter her mind. He mistakes that mystery for the possibility of true companionship and falls in love with her, even though a further vision shows him a future of fear and hatred in her presence. Alfred then dies in an accident, leaving Latimer as his father's heir and removing the obstacle between Latimer and Bertha.

Latimer marries Bertha after Alfred's death, but the mystery that drew him to her does not produce affection. Their life together becomes emotionally barren, and her concealed mind leaves him uncertain while her conduct makes her dislike increasingly clear. Latimer's intrusive perception of other people eventually weakens, giving him a short period of more ordinary existence, but the change does not repair the marriage. His old friend Charles Meunier, now a physician and researcher, visits while Bertha's maid, Mrs. Archer, lies dying. After the maid's death, Meunier attempts an experimental transfusion and briefly restores her to consciousness. Mrs. Archer declares that Bertha tried to persuade her to poison Latimer. She then dies a second and final time. With the murder plot exposed, Bertha leaves Latimer forever. His strange sensitivity returns, and he ends his narrative alone, convinced that the death he foresaw for himself is imminent.

Mrs. Archer dies while Meunier is visiting, and his experimental transfusion restores her to consciousness for only a few minutes. In that interval she tells Latimer that Bertha has tried to recruit her to poison him. The disclosure confirms that the hostility Latimer has sensed in his marriage has become a plan for murder. Mrs. Archer dies again after speaking, and Bertha leaves Latimer permanently once her scheme is exposed. Latimer is left alone with the unwanted perceptions that have isolated him throughout his life. He completes his account while expecting the death that an earlier vision assigned to him, with no reconciliation or escape from the future he believes is fixed.